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Thursday, September 23, 2010

Embarrassing moments - #26

(En español más abajo)

Embarrassing moments

We’re having many important visitors at the office this week, most coming from our headquarters in Antwerp, Belgium. One of them was our Executive VP of Information Technology, who did a presentation in front of all Waterloo employees. After that, he had one-on-one meetings with three of the almost 300 employees.

And I was #3.

I was not sure of why I had been picked; in spite of my very successful last couple of years, I still see myself as a footnote in our company’s organizational chart. I guess other people have a higher opinion about me than I do… While at the company meeting, this gentleman made a comment about the big projects we currently have in Brazil and that was my cue; maybe somebody had told him that I was the only employee from the North American offices that was involved, and he wanted to hear more about it… I would have to wait to know whether I was right or not.

He came to my desk on time, and we talked about our current projects for about 10 minutes. He asked me what my view was on what the near future had in store for us, and I told him. Then we started to talk about the Brazilian deals, and soon we were talking about how big São Paulo was, something that really impressed him. I then asked him if he wanted to see pictures of the city, to which he replied ‘yes’.

I opened Firefox, and did <Ctrl>+T to open a new tab. Typed ‘site:maps.google.ca Sao Paulo’ and hit Enter. The first thing that appeared was a popup window with a video featuring two girls… I remember that one of them was Ann Heche… :-(

I closed the video as quickly as I could, but there was no way he didn’t see it. Talking fast as if I could make him forget about the whole thing just by that, I showed him where the hospitals were, etc. Then he asked:

- May I drive?

- Sure! Here’s the mouse…

The moment he touched the mouse, my whole computer crashed completely. Both monitors went black, the keyboard lights died and so did the laptop. I pulled it out of the docking station and opened it. Every single application I had up crashed and closed and then the computer just rebooted.

Our Executive VP looked at me and then got up. He said:

- Well… it’s seems that is it for now.

And he left. A few minutes later I found him talking to our Site Manager, whom I barely know. Pointing at our VP, I said to him:

- Be careful with this guy. He broke my computer.

I’m amazed at the fact that I can make jokes like that and still keep my job. It’s all in the delivery, I guess. I’m always the one who looks dumb, so nobody could ever take offense…